Tag Archives: NIH

When I was an undergraduate, I read about horrific maternal deprivation experiments that Harry Harlow conducted in the 1950s and 60s. It was hard to read about them, but they happened in the past–or so I thought.

Harlow died thirty years ago but his protégé, Stephen Suomi has picked up with Harlow left off. Suomi works at a taxpayer-funded, NIH (National Institutes of Health) lab in Maryland, where he continues to conduct similar experiments.

PETA recently released disturbing proof of psychological experiments on baby monkeys. You can learn more here.

PETA also ran a full-page newspaper ad in Washington, D.C., that condemned the studies. The ad prompted a CSPAN host to confront NIH Director Francis Collins on live TV about the ad and the experiments.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) just announced that it has accepted the Institute of Medicine’s recommendation of retiring over 300 of its chimpanzees. The US has been experimenting on chimpanzees for 90 years and is the last country in the industrialized world to do so.

The chimps’ similarity to humans makes them coveted for research, but it’s this very similarity that poses an ethical dilemma. Regardless of similarities, no animals should be used as research subjects, so it’s a great piece of news that most of the chimps will be retired.

The news is mixed though. Fifty chimps will remain with NIH. They won’t be bred, but that’s not enough. They also deserve to live out their lives at a sanctuary. Each one is an individual with unique traits and the right to live free from harm.